Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher has been drawn by Hegel[13] in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi touched hands--though not in a sympathetic spirit--with a somewhat motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates, but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing stages, in which we are not ourselves,--whereby we also lose the true perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of spiritual being. We have grown into _verständige Leute_--people of practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come--if it could come--as the great breath of life--of 'reason' (_Vernunft_) which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and knowledge. But to this band--which has been styled the Romantic School of Germany--the liberation came in ways more analogous to that craved for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,--free in the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely _jus aggratiandi,_ the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.